What kind of career can students seek in financial services? How can they prepare for those roles? And what does it take to succeed?

A quartet of panelists -- Tony Longi, Michael Loffredo, Tracey Stofa, and Joel Dumes – talked about those topics at the Executive Speaker Series panel “Discovering Your Career Path In Financial Services” at the Farmer School of Business last month.

The panelists represented a wide variety of roles in financial services, from managing endowments and personal wealth management to company acquisitions and commercial real estate.

“I graduated from Miami in 2002. I had a major in Marketing and a double minor in International Business and Japanese. Quite random, because I use none of those three things in my current life,” Dumes, managing director at Franklin Street Student Housing, said. “The guy that owns the company is also a Miami alum. Two of my former roommates are in the business together with us. So it's pretty cool that we've reunited in some way.”

“I wanted to teach math and science in high school, and I wanted to coach sports, because that's what I knew when I grew up. My dad played in the NFL and then had a good business career,” Stofa, a managing director at Fort Washington Investment Advisors, said.  “He told me, ‘Tracy, get your business degree. You can always go back and teach.’ I did get my business degree. I chose personnel and employee relations, because for me, that was the closest thing to teaching in the business world.”

Longi, director of investments for Miami University, said he had a lot of different roles in finance before coming to Oxford. “My background is mostly in fixed income, high yield bonds and leverage loans, mostly in the public markets, but I have spent time in the private debt asset class as well, which continues to be a growing segment of the investment marketplace. For the last eight years prior to joining Miami's team, I was the chief operating officer for a distressed debt hedge fund.”

A 2017 alum, Loffredo is a vice president of investment banking at William Blair. “We're taking companies in the middle market, so sizing from $100 million to a few billion dollars, and helping that company sell itself in the marketplace – contacting private equity firms, strategic parties, other sources of capital, to help transact that business.”

The panelists talked about various aspects of their jobs and their advice to students seeking a career.

“In my world as a financial advisor, you can understand investments and be very, very smart, and that is fundamental to our business. But if you cannot connect with people, if they don't trust you, if you can't build your book of business, you're out of a job. So, I think people forget that it really is about people,” Stofa said.

 “I will tell you the single biggest aspect of your world after graduation is relationships, because who you know will open up more doors for you than what you know,” Dumes noted. “I promise you, I will get you an interview with anybody, anywhere in Cincinnati, relative to real estate, if I like you and you know me well enough.”

“I think one of the interests of why I went into investment banking is if you do have that opportunity, after two, three or four years, you can take that level of experience, take that skill set and apply it basically anywhere else,” Loffredo said.

“If a donor gives a million dollars to Miami to fund scholarships students in perpetuity, that million dollars must keep working forever. So, as the manager of that money, we don't want to ever jeopardize that gift,” Longi said. “We don't spend that million dollars. We use it to earn more. And then there's a distribution that comes off that every year for scholarships. It can be complicated. We actually have about 2,800 unique endowments we pool all in one portfolio to make it simple to manage.”

“70% of the people that do what I do fail miserably, and then of the 30% that are able to do it, you have different tranches of those groups of people. You get the top 10% that are making big dollars, that are doing awesome,” Dumes said. “Maybe the next 20% are making good money, healthy lifestyle, everything's great. Then there’s that big, giant middle which is just making an average living, grinding like crazy and just never making it to where they should be, and should probably get out of the job right away. And then there's the bottom 10 that are just hanging on for dear life.”

“The investment field is not a field for somebody who can't make a decision. You'll never be able to have all the information that you need to make an investment, and that's OK, because nobody does,” Longi said. “You have to be able to have the confidence to make decisions, learn from your mistakes, try not to make the same mistakes, and that's what makes people successful.”

“There is a different level of satisfaction when you get a great outcome, or when you're interacting with founders, entrepreneurs, families whose entire livelihood has been around building wealth in a specific industry or specific company, and you're able to generate a successful outcome for that family and you've been entrusted with managing the wealth or to sell their business, that's a different level of satisfaction that I did not appreciate when I was in your seat,” Loffredo said. “There is an incredible human element to it, outside of the relationships, where you can directly impact to the positive, meet really interesting people, people that you'll know for the rest of your life because you've had such an impact on them and have created such a transformative moment.”